Ira Kershwin
Ira Kershwin Gender/Race: Female Human Age: '''49 '''Titles: '''Senior Machinist, Guild Treasurer '''Description Short and slightly stout, Ira does not cut an imposing figure. For most of her life she's been the kind of person who has trouble being assertive, who gets interrupted when she tries to say something and isn't quite forceful enough to make herself heard. She's slightly awkward around people but persists in trying. She has short-cut black hair, a round face that makes her look a little babyish despite her years, and a pair of spectacles on a chain around her neck, which she uses for reading and close work. Background It all started with a merchant captain who wanted to know the probability of his vessel being set upon by pirates or customs agents en route. To Ira Kershwin this seemed a simple enough problem. Well, perhaps not simple, but after years of keeping track of Guild accounts she was eager for a challenge. Besides, it was such a relief to be recognized as someone of worth, rather than an essential but boring cog in the framework that kept the Machinist's Guild running. So few people appreciated the practical side of a background in mathematics! For such a creative group of people, machinists could be remarkably unimaginative; if it didn't have some practical use, they didn't want to hear about it. Their eyes glazed over until she gave up and let them get back to whatever it was they were working on. And as for people outside the Guild, heaven help her… Not particularly pretty, lacking a dowry and possessed of a surfeit of education, Ira was doomed to the Machinist's Guild at an early age. She'd fallen in love with mathematics at the age of seven; you may think this queer, but after being forced to endure the arbitrary whims of poetry and etiquette, the logic and consistency of numbers had a certain appeal. (Then, too, there was the lure of the forbidden, which is always powerful for children and the child-like.) Numbers were simple. They made sense. If you knew the rules, you could bend them into hoops and make them do tricks, figuratively speaking. She fixated on logic problems and new theorems the way her older sister fixated on ponies and (when she was older) dresses and (when she was older still) handsome suitors of good breeding. Soon enough her father had given up on making Ira an eligible young woman and told her tutors to just go ahead and give her the damn number books. (Bandobras was a merchant; he knew the worth of numbers. He just didn't think mathematics would make much of a life for his daughter, and let's face it, he was probably right.) His eldest daughter had gone into society's circuit of balls and dances eagerly, and deciding to be content with one daughter safely married, he let Ira head off to the Machinist's Guild. With a thorough education but very little practical experience, Ira was initially at a loss until she was taken under the wing of one of the senior accountants, who offered her an unexciting but fairly lucrative position as his assistant. In the years since she has risen to the position of treasurer for the Guild. Most machinists knew her only as the person you went to when you need a loan from the Guild, or the person who dunned you when you fell behind on your dues. She managed the Guild accounts, and in her spare time fell into imaginary worlds of numbers and formulae. Then came Captain Besh and his request. She threw herself into this new task, looking up historical records of piracy, weather patterns, the location of known pirate havens, the likelihood that other nations were funding privateers at the present time, which trade routes were know to be lucrative, which ones might be lucrative next season. The system practically exploded with complexity, increasing in scope every time she looked at it; when it had gone beyond the bounds of what could be calculated with paper and abacus, she turned to her fellows. A machinist named Bupkoff agreed to help her devise a better calculating machine, storing information on reels of copper with indents (an old method but heretofore only used in music boxes). The machine translated written text to this method of storage, and thus armed she set out to building a machine that could process all her beautifully intricate. And oh, success! Soon the machine—the Prognostication Engine, they called it—was churning out probabilities, and though they couldn't be certain of their accuracy Ira was confident in her formulae. And if they could predict pirates, what else? Trade profits? War? They dreamed of mapping the future. It started to go wrong after Bupkoff died. Ira was the brain behind the project, but he had been the hands, the one who translated her knowledge into a physical thing of copper and electrum. With him dead she was no longer entirely certain how the Prognostication Engine worked; and as if sensing this ignorance, the machine began to work erratically. Sometimes it gave irrational figures, based on assumptions that were uncertain or certifiably untrue; on one memorable occasion it asserted that the Emperor had died, and for six hours it spat out reams of dire predictions regarding privateers and civil war and rioting. At other times it gave predictions that appeared to be accurate, but were based on information nobody could remember giving it. Ira suspected that someone on the project crew were feeding it information in their off hours, but of course all of them denied it. Then one day the Prognostication Engine informed them that Chuyi Machiara (a 3rd-class machinist working on the project) had died seven minutes ago when she was mugged on the way to work. It described the event and her attacker in surprising detail. Her body was found in an alleyway later that day. Something strange is happening in the accounting wing of the Machinist's Guild. Advantages: Followers I - A dozen or so 2nd- and 3rd-class machinists who help run and maintain the Prognostication Engine from day to day. Originally brought in on the project by Vassily Bupkoff, they are now loyal to Ira... or perhaps to the Machine. (Machinist I Uncommon) Intelligence I (Common) - Ira possesses a formal education, a reasonably sharp mind and a fascination with complex puzzles and obscure facts. Nobody can deny she's sharp... on an academic level, at least. Machinist I (Uncommon) - Ira's title of Senior Machinist is almost purely ceremonial; she never had any kind of training with machinery, formal or informal. But her position carries with it the title of Senior Machinist, and so she is one, at least on paper. Titular or not, her rank carries certain rights and priveleges—and there's some advantage to being the person that machinists come to when they need money (and the person they avoid when they're behind on their guild dues)... Mathematician I (Rare) - Ira's true field of expertise is mathematics, both practical (in the form of banking, accounting and finance) and theoretical. The Prognostication Engine II (Uncommon) - Cumbersome, unreliable and mystifying as it is, the Prognostication Engine works. (Sometimes.) It is the greatest calculating device ever constructed, the apotheosis of the abacus... and if it occasionally seems to draw information out of thin air, well, that doesn't make it less effective.